Play With One’s Feelings: A Study on Emotion Awareness for Player Experience

Affective interaction between players of video games can elicit rich and varying patterns of emotions. In multiplayer activities that take place in a common space (such as sports and board games), players are generally aware of the emotions of their teammates or opponents as they can directly observe their behavioral patterns, facial expressions, head pose, body stance, and so on. Players of online video games, however, are not generally aware of the other players’ emotions given the limited channels of direct interaction among them (e.g., via emojis or chat boxes). It also turns out that the impact of real-time emotion-awareness on play is still unexplored in the space of online digital games. Motivated by this lack of empirical knowledge on the role of the affect of others to one’s gameplay performance, in this article, we investigate the degrees to which the expression of manifested emotions of an opponent can affect the emotions of the player and consequently his gameplay behavior. In this initial study, we test our hypothesis on a two-player adversarial car racing game. We perform a comprehensive user study to evaluate the emotions, behaviors, and attitudes of players in emotion aware versus emotion agnostic game versions. Our findings suggest that expressing the emotional state of the opponent through an emoji in real-time affects the emotional state and behavior of players that can consequently affect their playing experience.